when recruits were received. These diseases showed much higher rates in the home camps than in the A. E. F. While this curse was by no means eliminated in our armies in France, the low rate is a credit to the morals of our sons and the efficiency of medical officers. Naturally there was but little malaria in the A. E. F. Those who came into the home camps bearing the parasites of this disease were for the most part sterilized with quinine before going to France. Pneumonia was the most prolific cause of death in all our armies in every country and at all seasons. The morbidity rates from this disease ran from October, 1917, to September, 1918, about on the same level, crossing and recrossing, but never separating widely, in the A. E. F. and the home camps. With the advent of the virulent influenza in September, 1918, both lines made an abrupt ascent, but the peak of the curve representing the home troops reaches nearly six times the height of that for the A. E. F. Why this great difference? The divisions constituting the A. E. F. in October, 1918, had occupied the home camps the winter before and had left their most susceptible men in the hospitals and cemeteries in this country when they went abroad. Those who filled the home camps in the fall of 1918 were for the most part recently drawn from their scattered homes in which they had never come in contact with the bacteria of crowd diseases. Our statistical data, morbidity and mortality curves, fail to give us the real facts. They do not show the relative percentage of immunes in the two bodies which we are comparing nor do they indicate the losses by sickness and death incurred in the transformation of new into seasoned troops. Seasoned soldiers, as represented by our troops in France, bore even a new infection that of influenza - better than their raw comrades in this country. This suggests that there exists a non-specific immunity, which is of value, but is transitory, fluctuating in its protective power and hardly comparable with specific immunity such as has been secured in typhoid fever. At the present time one seems forced to conclude that the control of the pneumonias is most likely to be found in some form of vaccination and since these diseases are caused by multiple bacteria, the vaccine, must, as is the case in typhoid fever, be polyvalent. XX HOW PSYCHOLOGY HAPPENED INTO THE WAR1 I 1 ROBERT M. YERKES T has been said that the application of psychology to advertising rendered it respectable and that its applications to war advertised it widely and favorably and created an unprecedented demand for its services. The name itself seriously interfered with early developments in the army because of very common misconceptions and confusions. Psychology meant to the average army officer something wholly intangible, even mysterious. He thought of its methods as akin to those of the spiritualist, the devotee of psychical research, or those of the "medium." There also occurred very naturally serious confusion of psychology with psychiatry in the minds of nonmedical officers. This worked to the disadvantage of both subjects, because of their diverse aims, requirements, and 1 The following reports present complete accounts of the various lines of psychological service in the army and the navy: Psychology in Relation to the War, by Robert M. Yerkes. Psychological Review, Vol. 25, 1918, pp. 85-115. Report of the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council. By Robert M. Yerkes. Psychological Review, Vol. 26, 1919, pp. 83-149. Army Mental Tests. Edited by C. S. Yoakum and R. M. Yerkes. Pp. xiii-303. Henry Holt & Co., 1920. Psychological Examining in the United States Army (official report). Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. XV., Washington, D. C. (in press). The Personnel System of the United States Army. Vol. I, History of the Personnel System; Vol. II, The Personnel Manual. Published by the War Department, Washington, D. C., 1919. |